📺 Niconico Video Search & Ranking Scraper — Japan's Homegrown Video Giant

Optional delivery: Send results straight to your own Notion database or Supabase table in the same run, via Apify's native MCP connectors — the Actor never sees your credentials. One-click connect: Notion or Supabase. Leave blank to get the dataset as usual.

Search and rank videos on Niconico (ニコニコ動画) — Japan's original, fiercely-loyal video platform, often called "Japan's Bilibili" and the birthplace of Vocaloid, 実況プレイ (let's-play) culture, and the scrolling-comment format YouTube later copied. Pull titles, view counts, comment counts, My-List saves, length, tags, thumbnails, and watch URLs — no login, no Niconico API key.

This is a corner of the internet most Western scrapers can't reach. YouTube tooling is everywhere; Niconico — where a huge slice of Japanese fandom, music, and gaming culture actually lives — is almost completely untapped outside Japan. If you research JP entertainment, track Vocaloid/anime/gaming trends, scout creators, or build a media dataset, this is signal your competitors don't have.

📊 Sample Output

Real videos returned by this actor for { "mode": "search", "query": "ゲーム", "maxItems": 12 } — every row below comes straight from a live run:

Title	Views	Comments	My-Lists	Length
新・豪血寺一族 -煩悩解放 - レッツゴー！陰陽師	22,968,162	5,670,779	183,062	5:20
幕末志士達のスマブラ６４実況プレイ	17,714,612	276,096	153,230	15:10
DECO*27 - ゴーストルール feat. 初音ミク	12,770,162	191,222	117,232	3:26
【マリオ64実況】 奴が来る 伍【幕末志士】	11,882,794	704,990	54,980	20:54
東方紅魔郷Ultraモード 2周目突入 Stage1〜4	8,890,133	113,987	150,936	16:40
最強の匠は誰か！？…Minecraftをカ…	7,616,012	145,298	47,072	24:25
幕末志士達のマリオカート６４実況プレイ	7,478,971	87,383	53,321	18:46

Niconico ranks engagement very differently from YouTube: comment count and My-List saves (the platform's bookmark metric) are the true signals of cult status — a 22M-view video here carries 5.6M comments, the kind of density you never see on Western platforms.

What you get

Per video, a flat, typed record:

• Identity — content_id (e.g. sm9), title, description
• Engagement — view_count, comment_count, mylist_count (bookmarks), like_count
• Format — length_seconds, posted_at
• Discovery — tags[] (the rich Japanese tag folksonomy Niconico is famous for)
• Media — thumbnail_url, video_url (direct watch link)
• Creator — user_id
• Provenance — query, scraped_at

Sample inputs

1. Search by keyword (most common)

{ "mode": "search", "query": "ゲーム", "maxItems": 12 }

2. Most-viewed ranking, scoped to a theme

{ "mode": "ranking", "query": "VOCALOID", "maxItems": 30 }

3. Search sorted by My-List saves (find cult favorites)

{ "mode": "search", "query": "初音ミク", "sort": "mylist", "maxItems": 50 }

JSON sample record

One representative record, exactly as returned:

{
  "content_id": "sm9",
  "title": "新・豪血寺一族 -煩悩解放 - レッツゴー！陰陽師",
  "description": "レッツゴー！陰陽師（フルコーラスバージョン）",
  "view_count": 22968162,
  "comment_count": 5670779,
  "mylist_count": 183062,
  "like_count": 44165,
  "length_seconds": 320,
  "posted_at": "2007-03-06T00:33:00+09:00",
  "thumbnail_url": "https://nicovideo.cdn.nimg.jp/thumbnails/9/9",
  "user_id": 4,
  "tags": ["陰陽師", "公式", "音楽", "ゲーム", "ニコニ国歌"],
  "video_url": "https://www.nicovideo.jp/watch/sm9",
  "query": "ゲーム",
  "scraped_at": "2026-06-15T04:50:34Z"
}

How it works

This actor queries Niconico's public search/ranking endpoints through Apify proxy and parses the structured results directly — view_count, comment_count, mylist_count, like_count, length, tags, and watch URL — into one flat record per video. No headless browser, no brittle DOM scraping, no login. Pick search for keyword discovery or ranking for the most-viewed board, control ordering with sort (views / recent / comments / mylist / likes / length), and cap the run with maxItems — a hard ceiling, so compute and your bill never outrun what you asked for.

🗾 Why this Japanese data is unique

Niconico isn't a YouTube clone — it's a parallel media universe that shaped Japanese internet culture. Vocaloid (初音ミク) broke here, the 実況プレイ let's-play format was popularized here, and the platform's scrolling-comment overlay (弾幕) predates and inspired the format used worldwide today. Its tag folksonomy and My-List metric encode fandom signals that don't exist on Western platforms and aren't surfaced by any English-language tool. Pulling it in clean, structured, English-readable fields is the edge for anyone studying JP entertainment, music, or gaming.

⚖️ Legal & ToS

This actor reads only public Niconico search and ranking results — the same listings any visitor sees on nicovideo.jp, no login required. It collects publicly displayed video metadata (title, counts, tags, thumbnail, URL). It does not download video files, access private/members-only content, or touch anything behind authentication. You are responsible for using the output in line with Niconico's terms and your local regulations.

❓ FAQ

Q: Do I need a Niconico account or premium membership? A: No. The actor works entirely off public search and ranking pages — no login, no API key.

Q: What's the difference between search and ranking mode? A: search finds videos by keyword (Japanese or English). ranking returns the most-viewed videos, optionally scoped to a query/genre keyword — leave query blank for the overall top.

Q: What is mylist_count and why does it matter? A: My-List is Niconico's bookmark/save feature. A high mylist_count signals a video people deliberately kept — often a stronger quality signal than raw views, and unique to this platform.

Q: Can I download the actual video files? A: No. This actor returns metadata and the public watch URL only — it does not download or rehost video content.

Q: Why did I get fewer videos than maxItems? A: That keyword/ranking simply had fewer matching videos. maxItems is a ceiling, not a target — getting fewer is normal, not an error.

🔗 Related Actors

Pair this with the rest of the NexGenData Asia-video & trend fleet:

• 📹 Bilibili Video Search — China's Niconico — the China counterpart: search and rank Bilibili's video catalog
• 🇯🇵 Yahoo! Japan Realtime Trends — Live Buzz Ranking — what Japan is searching for right now
• 💬 5ch Thread Tracker — Japan's Biggest Forum — track threads and posts on Japan's most influential board
• 🏢 About NexGenData — we maintain 260+ production Apify actors for lead-gen, competitive intelligence, and hard-to-reach web data. Browse the full catalog at apify.com/nexgendata.

💰 Pricing example

This actor uses Pay-Per-Event pricing — you only pay for videos that actually land in your dataset:

• Actor start: $0.005
• Per item: $0.03

A 12-video search = $0.005 + (12 × $0.03) = $0.365. A 100-video deep pull = $0.005 + (100 × $0.03) = $3.005. No monthly minimum, no seats, no surprise overage bills.

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⭐ Found this useful?

If this actor opened up Japan's video catalog for you, a quick review on the Apify Store helps other teams discover it. Feature request or bug? Open it from the Issues tab — we read every one.